Day late, many $$$ short

Unluckily for me, the vulnerability addressed in the latest round of updates
was discovered and fixed after I'd already been attacked. In spite of having
all updates Windows, Norton and Lavasoft, and running my security software
religiously, my computer was taken over and destroyed. It started by
inexplicably re-booting, after which it worked fine for a little while, then
re-booted on its own again, followed by a message window from MS telling me
the system had recovered from a serious error (but not telling me what the
error was). It was suggested that I run my anti-virus software which I did
but nothing was found. The attack progressed further by first telling me of a
possible invalid OS, continuing to reboot on its own, then disabling my NIS
2009 and my firewall; I tried to turn it back on but no love, finally tried
recovery suite twice but both tries failed; last time I re-booted all that
came on were the fans.

Luckily for me, that was my spare computer. On my regular computer I went
first to Microsoft update and found nothing, then to Symantec where I learned
of the vulnerabilities. Everything listed there as "could happen" did in fact
happen to me over the course of this disaster. I immediately logged off and
turned off my remaining computer until this early A.M. at which time I
received the patches, hopefully we're in the clear for a while now. Really
lousy timing on my part, though this glaring hole in the product which led to
this exploit is hard to forget.

One thing of note; I have noticed for the last several months that when
receiving updates via AU, my connection is sporadic (dial-up 56k). What I now
do is log onto Microsoft Update, select custom, and manually download and
install, with a constant connection throughout. Once you guys catch your
breath, you might get someone to look into this.